With the emergence of new modular processing architectures for data centers, a new way of data processing is possible for both enterprises and consumers. A number of companies have set up data centers throughout the US as well as globally. An enterprise or individual consumer can subscribe to their services and can access their services through the Internet. When accessing these services, a subscriber can create virtual machines (VMs), request storage space, load applications from the virtual storage to the VM and activate the applications, etc. on an as-needed basis.
With this way of computing, users may off-load processing from their machines and use the services provided by the computing service providers. This form of the processing is commonly referred to as “cloud computing,” as the data processing is virtualized and resides in the Internet “cloud”. An example of cloud computing service provider is the EC2 service from Amazon.
Currently, VMs are charged by the hour by the clouding computing service provider. The size of the VM (in terms of computing power) would determine the rate. For some computing service providers, the basic service subscription comes with a number of “free” hours. Time used after that may be charged by the hour.